Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for a new feature which has been violating members' privacy. At the same time he has been trying to stop a website from publishing his personal details.
Photo: AP
After copping a barrage of criticism from users and the media, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has broken his silence and apologised for flagrantly breaching user privacy in the pursuit of profits.
The mea culpa comes as the 23-year-old social networking kingpin is being called a hypocrite for trying to force a website to take down unflattering personal documents from his university days, while he was at the same time profiting from the sale of Facebook users' personal information.
But the court ruled against Facebook and the documents, which include Zuckerberg's Harvard application and excerpts from his old blog, remain online. Among the details exposed were his girlfriend's full name, his parents' home address and his social security number.
Facebook's new ad system was meant to be a financial boon for the social network, offering companies the ability to run highly targeted ad campaigns based on even the most granular personal details contained in user profiles.
But one feature, dubbed Beacon, which lets users notify their Facebook friends when they buy something on other sites such as eBay, transformed Facebook's army of adoring fans into a lynch mob.
Criticisms centred on the fact that Beacon alerted users' friends of their activities on external sites without permission, and it was impossible to switch the Beacon system off entirely.
Users were given no choice on whether to opt in and the flames were further stoked by the apparent apathy of Zuckerberg and Facebook's PR team, which have been notoriously secretive and have failed adequately to address users' privacy concerns.
Adding further insult, a number of Facebook's initial partners, including Coca-Cola, pulled out of the advertising system following the litany of bad press.
Zuckerberg broke his silence today in a contrite statement published on the Facebook blog, acknowledging Beacon had been a flagrant breach of privacy.
"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them," Zuckerberg, whose paper wealth skyrocketed to $US3 billion following a $US240 million investment in Facebook by Microsoft, wrote.
"We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it."
Last week, long after the situation became a PR disaster, Facebook modified Beacon so users would have to opt in on each partner site before information on their activities was sent to their friends. Today, Zuckerberg said users would be able to disable the system entirely.
0 comments:
Post a Comment